A lesson in Death.

Content Warning: Suicide, Death, Mental Health Issues, Abuse.

For those who know this story and its participants personally, please allow the anonymity of this piece to stay intact. I have written this with love, and in the hope this story may help us help others in the future. 

In 2017, our drug riddled, addiction denying group of self described “chosen family” lost one of our sisters. It was not by any means the first time, and by all accounts wasn’t the last. I hope by sharing this story through the lens of my own experience that we can begin to support communities and people through those times that death seems a plausible alternative to our foggy realms of what we claimed was a radical existence. 

She was family to a lot of people. Blood relatives firstly, followed by the rest of the miscreants she had picked up and “mothered” throughout the years. I, myself, was one of the blessed few of whom she chose to bestow love and care upon. She would pick up the band, feed us cider and lines, allow us the privilege of overseeing her delirious and violent arguments and literally wipe our arses when we were too far gone, then drag our sorry substance reliant selves to recording studios and gigs. She, alongside almost everyone else in my life, was someone I took for granted. She introduced me to music I love, she made me laugh, she offered comfort and outrageous opinions at the right times. She kept me alive in ways I was too naive, young or outright ignorant to realize. At some point in the blur and chaos of our lives, she left too far off and distant unknown lands of France, 24 miles away. We always dreamt of leaving, convoying our shithouses on wheels to greener pastures. As I now know, the dreams of addicts, unless they start with getting sober, very rarely come true. So she became an inspiration. She discovered a place for us to live, and when she returned we dutifully followed her back onto the chaos of the road and the unknown, Special Brew in hand, debt in our pockets and rusty vehicles for homes, unmade, stained and cum covered beds for our rarely sleeping heads to pass out in once in a while. Alongside Her came her beloved, huggable labrador type, violently tempered, addicted and slightly delusional life partner. She shared a lot of love with this person, as we all did. Their relationship left a lot to be desired from the perspective of safety and conflict, but it always got passed off as just another “Her vs. Him”, and not much was ever done in the way of intervention, only bad mouthing behind backs and occasional drunken arguments that never amounted to any positive change based on love and care. Although, I’m told, the intentions were there. 

He had been around longer than some of us, and had a reputation. He robbed his way through France like he didn’t know the law existed, and kept us all in as much booze, diesel and chaos as we could ask for.

When we moved to France my life derailed itself at the pace of a rocket but this felt normal to all of us, and no one complained or questioned the fact I was so far from any water wagon that I might not even recognise one if it hit me in the regionals. 

She got ill. The type of ill that is representative of these communities. Head Sick. She left us in France, in her utopia, after an appropriate amount of drama, to return to England for a break. Me and her had been fighting. I had found out she had cheated on Him and had thought it best to let him know as I got so fucking tired of watching her treat him like shit without owning her own. Needless to say she was not impressed. She had made comments about me being a shit parent (which of course, I was, as I sat drinking away my life as my infant son was born in another country). I had reacted violently and we were slightly hostile to each other after this, despite the love that existed. I’m very quick to own my hypocrisy in the entirety of this situation, as someone who basically had, at the time, never taken responsibility for anything and expected others to pick up all my pieces when I smashed my life up, time and time again. Literally. I loved Her in ways that I can’t put into words. I hope the level of my love is obvious as I talk about all of the chaos and dark times. Her brutal honesty and beauty as a human shone through all of the chaos and she was a genuine friend. I hold her partly responsible for my life as it is today. In 2021 she appeared to me after I had tried to commit suicide, due to a heinous lie that was told about me, and one that formed the sort of lies that would be told throughout my cancellation and one that I decided I could not live with. She kicked me so hard in the head it woke me up, face down in a river. She saved my life from beyond the grave, and gave me my first real and tangible spiritual experience. My time here was not done.

Her brief return to England is not one I know much of, other than at one point in the blur I think I was in England for a weekend and remember sitting with an old friend, drinking the night away, and discussing the fact that she may well need sectioning, and that my friend, and others were extremely worried about her. She was suffering. She was wanting to die. She had tried to call me numerous times and I had let my anger get in the way and refused to talk to her. A guilt that will stay with me forever. However many times someone says, “There’s nothing you could have done.” It won’t stop me believing the contrary. 

She had collected a few of our beloved affable nitwits from the UK and decided to return to France. We knew she needed to come back, and we knew she wasn’t in a good way, and the returning convoy knew it was an urgent mission. They got as far as the French port before she jumped off the ferry. A very clear and obvious attempt at death, or at the very least, a very obvious show of how unconcerned she was with life. She was rescued, I think to her own dissatisfaction, and taken into hospital, affable nitwits in tow, drunk, scarred, confused and no doubt traumatized. She was later released, a bizarre decision, but one I know She had a part to play in. She was wonderfully convincing and sweet, often very genuinely, and often when it suited her needs. Off they go, the happy convoy on the road again, just another suicide attempt under the belt, and nothing more to dwell on. Until the morning. She had gone to bed in a tent on her own just hours after hurling herself off of a dover crossing ferry into the choppy French port waters. She had put a cable tie around her neck and about 20 seconds later she was consumed into the deep sleep in which she was so fervently trying to achieve for months before. She was dead. And no one found her until the light shone through the tent. He, the violently tempered loveable puppy dog found her this way. This is where I must leave Her, resting, wherever she ended up. Some love fuelled debauchery of an afterlife I hope. She is missed every day.

This story, however, is not about Her, nor particularly about death, but about how we treat those in our community who we decide are problematic. This story is about social exile. It’s about what our community did to Him. The scapegoat. The one it was easy to blame for our own shortcomings. After reporting Her death, He was kept in police cells for over 24 hours, being harrassed and interrogated by the state when all he needed was love and space to grieve and work out what the fuck had just happened to the women he loved. And I do believe he loved her. I believe we do not get to judge how others love. I believe their version of love was not conventional and I know their relationship was violent. I witnessed both of their violent behavior for years. They were a bloody nightmare, and I loved them both dearly and I also know they loved each other, one way and another, very very much. I know there are things our community could have done to stop suffering through intervention but we did not. I did not have methods or understanding of that then.

Unfortunately, where her story leaves off, the one of Him is just starting. My life went in a very separate direction from here on, hearing of the news of Her passing I fled deeper into the bottle and the next 6 months were a blur of international prisons, near death experiences, arguments and fights. His story was one of community violence, aggression and abuse. 

He returned to England. The funeral was attended by many people who had been in Her light and chaos over the years. He was ignored, blamed for her death, in no uncertain terms, and outright denied any sense of love from our “chosen family”. It was He who had caused Her death. When the exact nature of the claims was called out the rhetoric would be that it was ‘that relationship had killed her’. He was to blame. They ruined any chance of Him grieving in peace. He was given no space to process the fact that maybe He noticed some of his parts in her passing (as we all should have), and that to talk and receive love and comfort for mistakes would have been what He needed. Instead he was shunned, outed. Driven more into addiction and feeling more alone than ever, away from any love and friendship he should have been offered. I refer back now to the guilt I feel at not having picked up the phone. I wonder how many of our “community” have guilt in not doing things they could have in times of crises? I would suspect many. I write this from having extensive personal knowledge of both sides of this story. I have spent time around those who openly wished to condemn him, those who would use vague language to imply his guilt and I have spent time with him in person since all of this debacle began. I have also had extensive and long conversations over the years with those who were with Her on the journey to France, and who live through the trauma of the entire experience every day. The simple fact is that we could have saved Her life, and we chose not to. Not consciously, and incentivised by addiction and ease to blame others instead of looking at ourselves. Subconscious choices of guilt or twisted ideas of politics that possibly led to not calling the mental health team. We are not equipped to deal with this stuff, and if we refuse outside or state help on the grounds of Anarchism or whatever other bullshit label you wish to put on it, people will continue to die. Blaming our failings on one member of a “family” is not what I signed up for. I don’t care what you have done, or how you did it, you deserve love and recovery. I know she would respect me in saying that, and I write this in order to show solidarity with those who have been shunned and outed on a whim, simply because simplicity is easy, and to admit complicity is difficult. We are all complicit in our friends deaths in this community be it overdoses, suicides or drunk driving (the list goes on right?!) We have a chance to stop this, and I can only hope by sharing my story, my experiences and my thoughts on events like this that we can start to question our methods and our actions, and really take personal responsibility. Firsty for ourselves, and then to those we choose to call family. Passing blame and canceling people does not work, and is as aggressive as any other form of abuse. Don’t dangle your guilt and shame on other peoples heads by making very serious and very dangerous unfounded accusations whilst denying accountability of your own actions. This is literally worse than state punishment, and punishment to a traumatized and grieving addict that has, in my eyes, committed no actual crime. 

With love in our hearts and revolution in our minds I believe we can find these alternatives (that exist so readily outside of the cliquey leftist communities I reference and lived within) that do not leave any member of our community lost, hopeless, alone, abandoned and addicted because we didn’t want to take responsibility.